ABSTRACT
Higher education institutions that provide teacher education play a key role in a much-needed educational change. The Bologna Process has posed challenges to higher education institutions, implying changes in course structures and in the qualification of future teachers. More than just presenting and discussing innovative practices, it is fundamentally important to adopt them in teacher education, ensuring their sustainability. In this chapter we begin by giving a brief overview of teacher education in Europe, particularly Portugal. Subsequently, we outline the current trends in Science Education in the early years of schooling and their implications for Science teacher education. We also highlight teacher education programmes for Science Education with a Science-Technology-Society (STS) orientation that establish partnerships with the scientific-technological community, thus enabling learning in Science and Technology contexts. On this basis, we present a funded educational research project rooted in an action-research plan, which aims to intervene in a curricular unit of Didactic of Science of an Initial teacher education course in Portugal. This intervention includes the development of activities with a STS orientation, namely formal learning activities developed for the classroom, as well as visits to Science and Technology contexts such as scientific research laboratories. The objective is to develop the professional competences of future teachers and to monitor and ascertain the impact of the intervention on the evolution of views on STS and on the didactic transposition of the skills developed in the curricular unit to the context of Supervised Teaching Practice. It is fundamental to continue to conduct research on teacher education in different cultural contexts and to further develop benchmarks for such education in order to ensure sustainable quality in Science teaching.
